So do you have a RaspberryPi not doing anything at home? Got that 2GB class 4 SD card that you just don’t know what to do with it? Well this guide is for you! It will let you turn your Pi in to an IOT alarm clock, no code, no complicated commands, just flash, edit two text files and you are good to go. The alarm clock is controlled from Telegram, so you can set it and turn it off from your smartphone. I find that usually using my phone wakes me up. So it’s useful for me. You can also edit the alarm and use any mp3 file you want.
The code is all available in github. AlarmBot is the Telegram Bot. An AlarmPi is the distro (built with CustomPiOS yet again). (more…)

A computer that is running virtual box and virtualbox-fuse – I will show how to do this in Linux, but windows and Mac can do this too.

A copy of AndoVM – This is the reason we can do this, since android by default does not come with an Ethernet drivers and AndroVM is compiled and distributed to run on virtualbox out of the box (pun intended).

Friends keep coming up to me and complaining that they had to wipe all their phone because of some attempt to do something.
However, if you give me a brand-new phone and throw mine out of a high-building window, I won’t stop you, because I have a copy of my phone at home, from that same morning, and I don’t even have to think about it.

Want to feel free again? Not scared that this small thing you carry in your pocket with all your life gets ruined? Well, here is how you do it:

Things you will need

Your device needs to be rooted – I am afraid thats a requirement for Titanium backup and all programs that back up app data

Titanium backup – You can use the free version for backing up, but for a single-click restore you will need to pay (I bought it and recommended you do even if its the only thing you ever buy on the play store)

rsync backup for Android – This will back up all your photos and data that isn’t part of your apps, if you don’t root but this is all you want to back up, this post might help you too!

Although some readers might think that making alcohol out of plain apple juice might involve black magic, its actually quite simple. The only thing it really takes is time – about 3 months total to start drinking, but if you wait 5 months, you will get something that tastes much better. Its quite fun, and one can create unique flavors.(more…)

IGF 09 Day 2 – Internet Security, Social Networking IPv6 and a football match

Hi all,

Today was the second day of my visit, tomorrow IGF starts! Nearly all of the day I was in the 4th Symposium of GigaNet – a network of academic people that research Internet governance.

Although I am a technical person, and had to figure the basic relation the following: ICANN, IANA, ISOC, IGP, ccTLD and plenty more. However I’ll leave that to another post, since entire doctorates were written on how these organizations interact with each other (well ccTLD is not an organization, but you get the idea).

I managed to separate three topics I found interesting in particular so find the one you like:

(I am blogging this time on my OLPC/Nokia N810 so sorry about the typos)

I thought I might update that I arrived a few hours ago to the IGF conference.

Getting there

It took about 13 hours to get here, I have mostly been traveling in a taxi cab today from Taba to Shrem. Apparently there are a lot of security checkpoints because of the conference itself!

What is the Internet Governance Forum? – The ‘G’ in IGF

Since I have little of ICT news to tell I thought I might start with a conversation Dima and I had on the way here, regarding what the IGF means – When we wanted to translate the ‘G’ (for Governance) in IGF to other languages we did not know what exactly it means – Is it the government as in maneging the Internet as a resource? Or standardizing the Internet? or perhaps government as in how to get governments to interact with the Internet? It seems its a a bit of all, yet not clearly one of them nether. When looking at the huge number of workshops (10 in parallel!) this seems to become more apparent: privacy and freedom of expression, net neutrality, technical implementation of the infrastructure and how governments and organizations should treat the Internet, its all there. It seems it will be hard pick which workshop to go to!

About half a year ago, a law for internet censorship passed the first stage in our parliament, on its way to become in effect. The way it was done is disguising the law as a way to protect against child pornography.

There was quite a lot of opposition and finally at the beginning of this week, the law proposal was dropped. This of course makes quite us happy.

“I’ll give you an anecdote of a copyright seminar. The Danish head honcho came and said: You know, the politicians don’t understand file sharing. So what we need to do is to filter the internet. But since politicians don’t understand what that means, we should associate it with child pornography. Because politicians understand child pornography.“

I am happy to announce that I am flying to represent my country in the ITU Telecom conference in Bangkok. I am going to be there between the 30th of August and 6th of September. I am going there as a part of the youth forum, which is a nice way because all expenses are taken care of.

The goal of the ITU is to take care of telecommunication standards and you can read about them in Wikipedia. However I am going to a conference whose main objective is closing the digital gap in third world countries.